Anatol Lieven in Prospect

Opinions: 'Bipartisan disaster' by Anatol Lieven | Prospect Magazine September 2006 issue 126: "The foreign and security strategy of the Bush administration lies in ruins. The battering of the Lebanese state by Israel, with US support, came only months after US leaders vowed to support and defend that country as a beacon of democracy and progress in the middle east. The doublethink in US policy does not relate only to the contrast between the language of democracy and the disasters in Iraq and Lebanon. Even more striking is that this public rhetoric is diametrically opposed to America's actual strategy in the middle east, admitted privately by many officials, which is a reversion to the pre-9/11 norm: US and Israel reliance on autocracies in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt and elsewhere to hold down their own people. This is the strategy which Bush and the neoconservatives insist was proved to be bankrupt by 9/11; and whose proponents have been dismissed by Bush as racists because they supposedly don't 'believe that Muslims can self-govern.' "